Saying Less and Meaning Less Figure 2: the Attenuation Frame

Understatement might not seem like a big deal, but it is a force to be reckoned with. The phenomenon is paradoxical on the face of it: minus dicimus, plus significamus, say less and mean more. An understatement is a statement which, somehow, because it is conspicuously less informative than some other statement, can be used to express the meaning of the more informative statement. It is not a particularly cooperative sort of figure of speech. Such purposeful uninformativity runs counter to the Gricean principle that one should do what one can to make oneself understood, but it is consistent with the contrary principle that one should do no more than one has to (cf. Horn 1984, 2004; Levinson 1987, 2000). Like its figural cousins euphemism, allusion, meiosis, and irony, understatement depends on a hearer’s ability to enrich the content of some indeterminate meaning. Such figures can be difficult to understand, but they have real advantages as well. Saying less means less work for a speaker: fewer words articulated and fewer explicit constraints on meaning construction. And saying less and meaning more frees both the speaker from assuming full responsibility for what she communicates, and the hearer from any undue strain on his credulity. But why would anyone want to mean less? In fact, understatement is only possible because speakers do sometimes both say and mean very little. In this sense understatement depends on a more general phenomenon of attenuation, or semantic weakening. While understatement says less and means more, attenuation simply says less. But funnily enough, in order to say less, a speaker may have to do more. People regularly go out of their way to express themselves in ways that are less than fully forthcoming, and to do so, they can use a variety of linguistic devices which effectively minimize the content of what they say. The phenomenon is a mainstay of work on rhetoric and linguistic pragmatics (cf. inter alia, Spitzbardt 1963; Lakoff 1973; Brown & Levinson 1978; Huebler 1983; Caffi 1999), but it is easily underestimated. Attenuating